From Joe: T - minus 8 hours and counting

Getting close to lift-off.  Leaving for Rwanda in a few hours.  Anxious and nervous about going to Rwanda.  Ready to go, just don’t know what to expect, even though many people have told me what to expect. 

Re-flight routine this morning was like any other day at the Croasdale household.  What you would expect for a couple married 22+ years with two teenagers:

• Sherri (my wife) made me sign a power of attorney   “… just in case….”    Yes Sherri, the insurance is paid up too. 
• Ally (my 16 year old daughter) gave me a very long hug goodbye.  She wanted to remind me that she is still my little girl even though yesterday she just announced that she has an upper classman as a boy-friend.  Thanks Ally, that will make me sleep well at night.    
• Brendan (19 year old son) managed a good bye from his man cave upstairs.   But he has been doing his own charitable work since he got home from school.
• And to top it off, I broke my “indestructible suitcase” leaving the house. 

Although I want to help out wherever I can on this trip, I know I will walk away with much more than this 50 year old can give.  I hope to use my work experience to help the school financially and also to use my muscle (stop laughing Angela !!!) to do some physical labor.  I plan to attend a few classes while I am there and to introduce Frisbee to the school (and Al Berg).

Thanks for reading my first blog ever. 

More to come (with pictures) once we arrive.  I promise there will be no “dying albatross” videos of any of us. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT45YsA9I_Q

From Al - Val and Joe get a birds eye view from the water tower

From Al - Val up on the roof of guest house 3 replacing a balky access point

From Al - imparting my vast technical knowledge. Took ten minutes.

From Al - Justice getting the backup policies set for ASYV's servers

From Al - Jim getting the Village Operations Director's laptop all set up and virus free

From Justice : Back to work!

The mighty Val Zhupan arrived on Friday night and he soon got us back to work.

Saturday was very productive and we roped in two interns from Carnegie Mellon to assist us with installing wireless access points, repairing PC's, setting up backups for their servers.

 

 

Deo in the blue t shirt is the main IT guy at ASYV and pretty much single handedly manages the whole IT infrastructure.

 

Me working hard as usual. It looks like i'm playing with my fingers, but if you look very very closely, I’m actually manually putting a network cable together. J  That's Val's photography skills for you

 

 

That's better, l I look a bit more productive here.

 

 

 

From Justice : Time Out!!

Taking a much needed break after all the hard work we've been doing.

On the way to a local village called Rubona which is about a mile away from ASYV.

 

 

 

Some local ladies who for some reason couldn’t stop smiling at me J

 

 

There was a dance competition going on at the market. We tried to get Jim to join in but he made some excuse about having no rhythm. They were only kids, personally I think he would have tore the roof down with his moves......

 

 

 

It was all uphill on the way back to ASYV. I'm not sure if we were walking slowly or they were moving fast but we kept getting overtaken by people with produce and water from the village.

 

 

Kids from the local primary school. Their favorite words were 'Good Morning' and 'How are you'. Too cute!!

 

 

 

From Justice : Is there a spy amongst us???

Al Berg doing his thing on the computer. I think he’s a little confused as to who he works for? J

 

 

From Justice : Lunchtime

500 student on the way to Lunch in the dining hall. Food is served 3 times a day, Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner and 40% of what they eat is home grown on their farm.

 

 

 

 

Students chip in to serve dinner, and clean up

 

 

 

From Justice: The Liquidnet Family School

The Liquidnet Family School is situated at the highest point of the village and has amazing views across the land and rest of the village.

 

 

This is a view from just outside the school.

 

 

Their motto is. 'if you can see far, you can go far', this among other great sayings encourage the students to strive to be the best they can be.

 

This is a view of the rest of the village from the school

 

 

 

From Justice : Life Skills

The students have a mix of enrichment programmes that help with their personal development. In addition they also have subjects that teach them valuable life skills such as sewing, photo editing, farming and carpentry to name but a few. Below Joe and Jim are assisting the carpentry class